Nothing But Blackened Teeth(21)

I sat down as the two continued to bicker, chest to calisthenics-honed chest, shoulders scissored back, like one of them was on the precipice of inviting the other to waltz. On the walls, the yokai danced like they invented the idea, pirouetting through genres and periods, Nara to Muromachi, every shogunate of literati painting, austere to aureate, twelve bodies to a cosmic tango.

“You okay?” Lin touched fingers to my shoulder.

I looked up into his narrow face, kabuki pale, shaped like some kumadori artist had taken a brush to his bones, all slant and sharpness. A fox’s countenance, too clever even behind Coke-bottle glasses. The ohaguro-bettari stood behind his shoulder, smiling, every tooth capped in ink, so close to his cheek that he had to feel her breath on his ear. A stench of vinegar and rust seeped everywhere, and I tried not to think about silk and white satin, so many yards of both, enough to bury a corpse six times over. “No. There is no fucking way I could be okay.”

“Tell me about it.” Lin smiled like he meant it. We both knew he didn’t. He lit a cigarette—hand-rolled, cut with tamarind peel and weed—and squatted beside me, smoke curling between his teeth. The ohaguro-bettari followed, kneeling beside him, beside us. Lin didn’t look at her once.

But I did. I stared at the yokai as I took a toke from Lin’s joint. She had the angles of someone carefully starved from cradle to nuptials, clavicle and collarbone in stark chiaroscuro. Her skin didn’t just look like porcelain, it was porcelain, enameled and gleaming, faultless save for her red mouth; no eyes, no nose, no philtrum, not even the conceit of cheekbones. But even her flesh wasn’t as pale as the shiromuku she wore, the satin the color of expensive chalk.

“We could just go, you know?”

“No.”

“The doors aren’t locked. The manor isn’t keeping us in here.”

“Is that so?”

“Cat.” He plucked the cigarette from my fingers, his voice gentle as he could make it, the same timbre as the one you’d extend to a suicide risk: slightly frightened, too much syncopation. Lin’s breath plumed white. It’d gotten cold again in the last few minutes. “He isn’t your responsibility.”

I exhaled on my fingertips, the nails already purpling at the base. “He’s my best friend.”

“And an absolute fucking idiot.” A bristling of rage—not anger, Lin never did anything halfway—like the pelt of a dog rubbed the wrong way, his smile vicious.

I nodded. There wasn’t much else to say so we sat for a long minute, passing the cigarette between us until it shriveled to an ember, Faiz and Phillip fighting the whole while. They’d diversified to character attacks, petty insults, all those years of friendship run through the abattoir, back and forth until every secret was turned inside out. Any second now, something was going to snap, a neck or a temper or a spine.

I looked over. The ohaguro-bettari was smiling like an ingénue at her first soiree, a blood-soaked husband on the horizon. He’d be the last man to stagger from the killing block, an axe in his hands, and that’s how you knew he was the one. Because he was a survivor, Mr. Take No Prisoner.

“Look, I’m not going to insult your intelligence. We both know exactly what’s going to happen next. One of them”— Lin jerked his chin at the pair, his fingers curling with mine and when he squeezed, I squeezed back, hard as I could, like our hands could keep us moored in normal—“is going to say something really fucking stupid. The other one is going to snap. If it’s Faiz, he’ll get a boost of adrenaline and he’s going to grab Phillip, and they’re both going to wrestle until Faiz somehow manages to accidentally impale him on a piece of scenery.”

“And if it’s Phillip?”

Lin had a laugh like a bark, like a wound weeping sepsis. “Faiz is going to die outright. Duh.”


*

This is the problem with horror movies:

Everyone knows what’s coming next but actions have momentum, every decision an equal and justified reaction. Just because you know you should, doesn’t mean that you can, stop.


*

Phillip moved first.

If I was a betting woman, I’d have put money on Faiz being the one to break the stalemate. I’d have gambled on his idiocy. Grief makes us worse people. But it was Phillip who pulled the metaphorical trigger, knuckles gore-smeared as he drew his knuckles back from Faiz’s face, vermillion and black. Faiz gawped at him, palm cupped beneath his jaw, nose bridge split in three spaces, the tip concave. He drooled blood and rills of mucus.

“You broke my nose.” You brok muh nus. Enunciation is a bastard when your nasal septum has been flattened, and your mouth is sticky with salt and snot. Faiz swallowed, rubbed his thumb along his chin. The skin stayed red and wet.

“I—” Phillip shook out his fist and stared at Faiz, stupefied. Golden-boy Phillip, good-guy Phillip, valedictorian, voted “Most Likely to Succeed” seven consecutive years in a row, cut down at the knees, no more exceptional than your average punk, another man’s blood curdling between his fingers. He wiped his hand over his face, leaving four lines across his cheeks. “I didn’t mean to.”

His voice was a hush, full of shame for the sin he’d committed against better judgment. Men like Phillip don’t punch people. Except when they do.

“You broke my fucking nose.”